Peace be with you. Friends, on this Feast
of the Holy Family —so it's the very
day after Christmas— I'm aware that we've all
probably been with our families very recently,
our immediate families, our extended families. And I want to tell you about
a member of my extended family. It has always caused me to
reflect on things more spiritually and theologically
talking about my Uncle Tommy. Uncle Tommy was my
father's older brother, though he outlived my
father by many years, and Uncle Tommy was in
the Second World War —he must have been in his
early twenties in those days— and he was sent
over to England and then over to Europe,
and in 1944, in that winter of ’44, he fought in the
Battle of the Bulge. Anyway, he comes
home from the war, and probably today we would
say he was suffering from post-traumatic stress or we'd have
some way to diagnose what it was, but whatever happened to him over
there affected him very negatively. And Uncle Tommy just had a
difficult time when he got home; couldn't hold a job,
he got several different jobs and never had
them for very long, fell into conflict or
he was afraid to go to work or whatever. He never married,
so he couldn't really get his personal life
quite in order. And he was probably looked
upon by a lot of members of his own generation as,
well, poor Tommy, poor Tommy. Well, I'll tell you though,
we kids loved him. So, as his siblings had kids,
me and my cousins, we would gather at grandma's
house for all the great events. And the adults were all
there and they were, of course, good to us. But Tommy was
especially our friend. He would play
football with us. I have very vivid memories of
playing football on the street in front of my grandmother's
house and Tommy acting as the coach and the quarterback,
and I learned a lot of sports as a kid
from him. I remember going to
Angel Guardian Orphanage —Chicagoans know what
I'm talking about— and racing with him
around the track. I remember playing
basketball with him as a kid. The other great gift that
my Uncle Tommy had was —I'm all Irish,
both sides of my family and he was like uber-Irish— had the Irish gift of storytelling
and of jokes and humor. We just died laughing as he would
tell us these marvelous stories, which he found very amusing,
and often I think we laughed more at his laughter. Anyway, he was marvelous,
raconteur, and he would tell
us the stories, he'd play sports with us,
and he was just a great friend. I think what happened to a lot
of us cousins as we got older, we found that maybe we had
kind of outgrown Uncle Tommy, and then we began to move
on with our lives and so on. He lived with
my grandmother, and she lived to be
quite an old lady. When she died,
Uncle Tommy was kind of lost, and we got him
an apartment, and he would stay
there for a time, but then he’d drink too
much or he would lose the place or whatever. It just was difficult to keep
him kind of in one piece. So anyway, years go by,
and he hung in there, and he was a churchgoer. He was a man who took
in from his parents a deep Catholic faith and
practiced it. Anyway, he becomes eventually a
fairly old man and it was just, how should I put it,
kind of difficult for different reasons for Tommy
to come to the family gatherings. So my brother and I
conspired to bring him to my brother's house
on Christmas Eve, or maybe a couple
days before Christmas, to have a special
dinner with him. So my job in those days was
to get him at his apartment, which is always a
little bit challenging, and then bring him
to my brother’s and then bring them back. Now, this is December 23rd,
December 24th in Chicago. So usually it was miserable
weather and snow and ice, and so I’d drive down to
uncle Tommy's apartment and I would find him there
and get him in the car. And by this time he
was pretty much deaf. We thought he could hear
maybe a bit selectively, but he was pretty bad. And so we'd have these
conversations in the car, and he was very attentive,
in kind of a beautiful way, to the careers of his
nieces and nephews. He followed what
we were doing. And my brother during those
years was really climbing the ladder in his
chosen profession, which was the
newspaper business. He was the reporter,
then editor, and then editor in chief
of a certain section. Then finally he became
editor in chief of one of the big
papers in Chicago. So he was really
making his moves. So I'd be in the car with
Uncle Tommy driving him and he'd say, "Well, Johnny is
doing really well." And I'd say,
"Yeah." “What?” “Yes, Johnny is doing well." Then it'd be a
pause and he'd say, “And you're still
just a priest?” "Yeah, still just a priest.” “What?” “Yes, I'm still
just a priest." So that was sort of the
nature of the conversation with Uncle Tommy. We get to my brother's house,
and I remember this very vividly. It was beautiful. He had a big bag,
like a plastic bag or a garbage bag. It was filled with —I don't know where
he got these things— toys and clothes for
my brother's kids, who were very
young at the time. And he'd come in the house,
literally like Santa Claus with a bag over his shoulder,
and open it up. I think my brother and
sister-in-law would kind of take a careful look at what
exactly was in that bag before the kids
would play with it. But they loved him too. The same way we did
when we were their age. They sensed even in this
old man who's deaf and very compromised, they recognized this sort
of loving spirit in him. Uncle Tommy died
on New Year's Day. I think it was the year 2002,
so I want to say almost exactly twenty years ago. And there's something poignant
about the way he died, because even with all his
struggles and all his difficulties, he was a churchgoer,
as I said, and he would go to Mass
typically every day. He would walk from his
apartment to church. And he was walking to
Mass on New Year's Day, and he was stone deaf,
so he didn't hear traffic very well,
and he was struck by a car as he was on his
way to church. And here's one of
the great ironies. He was struck by a rabbi
who was on his way to his church service. And he died.
That's how Tommy died. And so we all just were
caught up in some of the irony and some way the poignancy
and beauty of his death. And I remember preaching
at his funeral, and I said, “Well, Tommy was always
disappointed that I was still just a priest.” So I said, "If I become a monsignor
in the next couple weeks, we know that he's in heaven." Anyway, why did I tell you
this story about Uncle Tommy? Because I'd be
willing to bet, almost everybody listening
to me has got someone in your family like Uncle Tommy. I bet everyone's got someone who's
maybe not completely put-together, someone whose life kind
of got off the rails at a certain point, someone who doesn't
quite fit in, maybe is a little
bit eccentric. And you probably spent
some time with them just in the last
couple of days. What do families teach us? One lesson, I think, is,
we don't always get to choose the people we love, but we're given people that
we’re then called upon to love. So there were lots of
people in my family, my extended family,
who were very lovable, who had nothing but
good qualities and were easy
to spend time with. There was someone
like Uncle Tommy, who did have
marvelous qualities, who was a dear friend to us, especially when
we were kids, but it was also,
I don't know, kind of a
difficult personality. Maybe be pretty easy to say, "Ah, you know,
Tommy, I'm not going to deal with him." But I think God,
through our families, is giving us the people
he wants us to love, and part of what
makes our families holy is that we have this capacity, that we cultivate
this capacity of love, not just the people
that we like, that we have
chosen to be with, but the people whom God
has given us to love. Here's something else,
a second spiritual lesson I'll take from
the Uncle Tommy story. So our family had this
kind of wonderful, quirky, eccentric figure,
Uncle Tommy, part of our extended family. When the Word became flesh,
when God became human, God entered into a family. Now, the Blessed
Mother and St. Joseph, two of the greatest,
most sublime saints in our entire tradition. Yes.
Yes. They were the most intimate
members of his immediate family. Do you ever wonder though, what were
the Virgin Mary's cousins like? What were her
second cousins like? I'd be willing to bet, there were
some eccentric figures among those people. The Blessed Mother,
I mean of course, but her second
and third cousins, the people that might show
up at family gatherings —I bet there were a few odd,
quirky figures. How about Joseph's
side of the family? Did Joseph have an eccentric
uncle or a great uncle or cousin or a nephew? Did Jesus have cousins
who were maybe a little bit difficult
to be with? They didn't quite know
what to do with them? Yeah. In fact, go into those great
genealogies in the Gospels that tell the story of Jesus' extended
family going back in time. Are there heroes?
Yes, indeed. But are there a lot of
shady characters too? You bet. A lot of
questionable figures? Absolutely. And here's the point,
everybody, my second spiritual lesson:
God saw fit to enter into just such a family. God saw fit to enter into
this intimate connection, yes, with the Blessed Mother
and St. Joseph, but also all these other
people that were connected to them. All these different relatives,
all these quirky members, undoubtedly, of their family. God loved them too. Loved the heroes,
you bet, and loved those who were a little
bit off-kilter. And see that's the reason
why we are called to love those that God
has given us to love. Not just those that we like,
not just those that we choose, but the ones that God
has given us to love. So maybe on this
Holy Family Sunday, I am saying a special
prayer for Uncle Tommy, who was a good friend
to me when I was a kid, and who was a marvelous
figure and a quirky, eccentric, flawed figure too. Okay. Maybe you can say a prayer for
the Uncle Tommy in your life and realize that
you're called upon to love, yeah, all those that God
has given you to love, because that's the way he
entered into the human family. And God bless you. Thanks so much for watching. If you enjoyed this video,
I invite you to share it and to subscribe
to my YouTube channel.
